- Joined
- Dec 28, 2001
My manager at work had an HP that was getting flaky. I came over to check it out, and spotted bulging caps on the motherboard. The motherboard was manufactured by ECS, and they offer an almost identical one for retail sale. I ordered one of those, and swapped it out.
My goal was to recap the OEM board, and put its PCIE slot to work with a card for folding. I found a decent deal on an AM2 dual core here in the classifieds, and I went to work on the board last night. It's a bit of a pain since I don't have the greatest soldering iron, and only have desoldering braid. But with persistence, I salvaged the necessary capacitors from a couple of dead boards I have, and soldered them on.
I assembled it, and it powered on. But I had plugged the fan into the wrong header, and it shut down because it couldn't detect the CPU fan. But when I plugged it into the correct one, the fan ran very slowly. The POST screen warned me that the CPU fan was failing, and to press F2 to continue. I'm guessing that the BIOS was looking for a thermistor on the HSF, which wasn't there (both fan headers were variable speed with the stock fans, pretty typical for HP). This was an annoyance, and I was rooting through my junk to see if I had a three pin to molex adapter, so I could hopefully power the fan externally, and leave the RPM sensor attached. But I found a much better solution.
There is a modded BIOS available for these boards that completely does away with all of the OEM crap, allows for overclocking, and lots of other good things! I tried it, it was successful, and I then loaded Windows XP on the machine, which has been working perfectly! I wanted to post about it here in case any members have, or come across one of these boards. If you have one, you'll like it much better with this BIOS.
Here's the link to the BIOS, and the instructions (also, the instructions are great for updating the BIOS on any newer motherboard that will boot from a USB drive) http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-HP-MCP61PM-HM-Nettle2-5-27-With-Unlocked-Overclocking-Options
My goal was to recap the OEM board, and put its PCIE slot to work with a card for folding. I found a decent deal on an AM2 dual core here in the classifieds, and I went to work on the board last night. It's a bit of a pain since I don't have the greatest soldering iron, and only have desoldering braid. But with persistence, I salvaged the necessary capacitors from a couple of dead boards I have, and soldered them on.
I assembled it, and it powered on. But I had plugged the fan into the wrong header, and it shut down because it couldn't detect the CPU fan. But when I plugged it into the correct one, the fan ran very slowly. The POST screen warned me that the CPU fan was failing, and to press F2 to continue. I'm guessing that the BIOS was looking for a thermistor on the HSF, which wasn't there (both fan headers were variable speed with the stock fans, pretty typical for HP). This was an annoyance, and I was rooting through my junk to see if I had a three pin to molex adapter, so I could hopefully power the fan externally, and leave the RPM sensor attached. But I found a much better solution.
There is a modded BIOS available for these boards that completely does away with all of the OEM crap, allows for overclocking, and lots of other good things! I tried it, it was successful, and I then loaded Windows XP on the machine, which has been working perfectly! I wanted to post about it here in case any members have, or come across one of these boards. If you have one, you'll like it much better with this BIOS.
Here's the link to the BIOS, and the instructions (also, the instructions are great for updating the BIOS on any newer motherboard that will boot from a USB drive) http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-HP-MCP61PM-HM-Nettle2-5-27-With-Unlocked-Overclocking-Options
